The Internet, through its billions of Web pages, provides a vast and quickly growing library of information and resources. To find desired content, computer searchers often make use of search utilities. Exemplary Internet search engines are well known in the art, for instance, a commonly known commercial engine is the BING® search engine provided by Microsoft Corporation of Redmond, Wash.
To ensure users are providing a query that will prove most useful in retrieving the results they desire, many search utilities offer query-completion suggestions as the user inputs a partial search query (e.g. question). Upon selection of a particular query-completion suggestion, the selected query-completion suggestion is searched against the general web search domain and results are provided to the user in the form of a search engine results page presented in association with the general web search domain (e.g., www.bing.com).
One conventional search utility available to computer searchers is a question processing system. The conventional question processing system receives partial or complete questions from the searchers and returns a search results page having the questions and some answers to the received questions. In operation, conventional question processing systems rewrite the questions and search an index for documents having sentences that match the original questions and the rewritten questions. For instance, a searcher may issue “WHERE IS WALDO” to the questions processing system. This question may be rewritten as “WALDO IS IN” “WALDO IS AT,” etc. The conventional question processing systems would then search for documents that contain the phrases “WHERE IS WALDO,” “WALDO IS IN,” or “WALDO IS AT.”
Upon finishing the search in the index for documents, the documents with the phrases are selected by the conventional question processing systems. Then the terms included from the original query are highlighted by the conventional question processing systems.